The I and the Not-I

The I and the Not-I is the pair by which Jung names the fundamental psychic polarity of consciousness: the I as the ego’s self-identification, and the not-I as everything the ego encounters as other — the outer world of objects, the inner world of unconscious contents, and the shadow in which the ego’s rejected material lives. The formulation is inherited, in German idealist lineage, from Fichte, for whom the Ich and the Nicht-Ich name the founding moment of self-consciousness.

For Jung, the pair is the structural coordinate of the ego: an ego exists only insofar as it has distinguished itself from what it is not, and the quality of that distinction determines the quality of the personality. The analytic work is not to dissolve the distinction but to render it permeable, so that the contents of the not-I — the shadow, the anima or animus, the archetypal figures of the collective unconscious — can be brought into relation with the ego without either inflation or annihilation. The Self is the figure that holds both poles together; individuation is the movement by which that holding becomes actual. See ego and shadow.

Relationships

• ego
• shadow
• self